We Are Less Secure, and Less American

We Are Less Secure, and Less American

Article excerpt

As a candidate, Donald Trump first promised a ban on all Muslims
entering the United States. He later walked that back, saying he
wanted "extreme vetting" of Muslim immigrants. As president, Trump
followed through with an executive order that pleases his political
base, but upends our nation's credo as a country of immigrants.

With a stroke of the pen Friday, Trump imposed a 120-day ban on
all refugees entering the United States. Additionally, he imposed a
90-day ban on immigrants coming from seven Muslim-majority nations -
Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen - as well as an
indefinite ban on accepting all Syrian refugees.

The order went out with little notice to the federal agencies
charged with enforcing it. The result was predictable: chaos.

More than a hundred people in transit were thrust into legal
limbo as they disembarked from planes believing they had arrived in
the land of the free.

Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an Iraqi who served as an interpreter
working with U.S. troops in Iraq for more than a decade, was one of
those people. Darweesh told The New York Times once he was released
after he was held in detention for 19 hours, "What I do for this
country? They put the cuffs on. You know how many soldiers I touch
by this hand?"

These are the real people caught in Trump's quickly dropped net.
Yet the president remained dismissive about the aftermath of his
executive order. On Monday, he claimed in a tweet that a Delta
computer outage caused more problems at U.S. airports. He also
tweeted, "If the ban were announced with a one-week notice, the
'bad' would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad
'dudes' out there!"

Despite Trump's ineloquent tweet, it takes Syrian refugees two
years on average to be vetted for entry into the United States. It
is not a one-week process. And giving government agencies enough
time to understand the executive order and the administration enough
time to grasp what it was actually doing would not have been
irresponsible - in fact, it would have been the opposite. …